Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

From that day forth, while her life lasted, Ann Mary Collins adopted the name Charlie; she called me plain “Mister,” as if that was my given name. This graceful creature had surprised my heart with the first joy it ever knew. I’d been dead and dry as the white clay in the road. My life had been breathed back into me at last.

She heard the bad stories soon enough. Lem Collins’s parents got them straight from Herlongs, and Lem warned me. Charlie refused to repeat what she’d been told. There’s so much good in you, she whispered. She only hoped that her love for me was so pure and so strong that no matter what I’d done, God would redeem me. “Damn!” I swore, startling her. “How do you know that I’ve done anything ? Why don’t you tell me what they said and I’ll tell you the truth.”

“You don’t need to hear their wicked gossip, Mister, and I don’t need to hear your truth. Whoever you are, I believe in you, and that is truth enough for me.”

One day that fall I borrowed Aunt Tabitha’s buggy and took her to the Ichetucknee, where we’d met. We left the buggy at the store and walked barefoot down along the edge of the blue springs, beneath a canopy of crimson maples, old gold yellow hickories, russet oaks. Charlie picked watercress for our wild lettuce, and a blueberry with reddish stems: she called it sparkleberry. She led my eye to the woodland birds of fall, knew their brown names-hermit thrush, sparrow, winter wren.

Charlie gave me her hand as we walked home. Bravely she presented me to her silent family and bravely I came calling every Sunday and helped with chores whether they spoke to me or not. I burned hickory and boiled ash resin for lye soap, worked flax for linen, parched goobers for coffee, ground homespun dyes from sweetgum and red oak, stuffed Spanish moss and feathers into mattress casings. I even helped with the washing, which I’d always hated. Built a fire in the yard, stirred flour for starch into cold rainwater before heating up the tub, then shaved a soap cake into the water. Barefoot, Charlie sorted the wash into white and colored, dirty britches, rags. We rubbed out spots on a rough board, then boiled them. Never boil the dyed things, Mister Watson, Charlie frowned, wagging her finger under my nose and blushing when I caught it in my mouth. The parents watched.

“Mind you, it’s Sunday, miss,” warned Mr. Curry Collins.

Fished out with a broom handle, the fresh wash was spread to dry, then the soapy water was applied to the privy bench and floor. I cursed my dirty nature for imagining, God forgive me, my dearly beloved’s bottom, neat as an upright pear on that wood seat. I emptied the tin tubs as she slipped indoors and bathed, and of course I pictured that sweet ceremony, too. She came out in a fresh dress, combing the water from her hair, and brewed some tea. Those eyes over her porcelain cup drew me deep into her soul as her mother came and went just out of earshot. We were lost in each other’s awe. She pressed my hand. “The greatest blessing ever to befall this foolish girl,” she said, “is Mister Watson.”

As a middle-aged bachelor, William Curry Collins had married the Widow Robarts, one of whose sons was my friend John Calhoun Robarts, called “J. C.” Ann Mary was their late and only daughter. I offered to accompany Mr. Curry down the Santa Fe and the Suwannee all the way to the Gulf at Cedar Key, where we hired two black men and boiled half the Gulf of Mexico for a few barrels of salt. After that hard expedition, Mr. Curry thought the world of me, informing Ann Mary that her beau was an exceptional young man. “Don’t I know it!” cried his happy daughter, that’s what J. C. told me.

Mama and Minnie adored Charlie, exclaiming over what this girl had wrought in a few seasons with their abrupt and sullen son and surly brother. These days he reeled off Greek quotations and Romantic poetry, bursting into song and spouting nonsense just to make them smile: “Sappy but happy with no pappy!”-that one made Minnie nervous even now. “I thought you’d never learn to smile,” Mama reproved me. I rattled her with a surprise hug just to hug somebody, and Minnie, too. “Our family has never been so happy!” Ninny cried, wailing at the great pity of it all.

Charlie is my Darling. Her sweet tenderness had cracked the ugly crust I’d carried south from Edgefield. From the dull clay of melancholic anger she had fashioned an irreverent fellow who loved to tease and banter, tell outrageous stories. Alone, we could talk seriously, and over time I would confide to her most though not all of what had happened in my boyhood. When finally I blurted out my pain and guilt about the awful way the Owl-Man died in that black ruin, she fell silent for a while and my heart pounded. Then she took my hand. “Our Redeemer always forgives a repentant sinner. We need never speak of this again.”

With my scrimped pay, I leased an old cabin on Robarts land just west of the plantation. The front door was gone and the back door, too. The one window was boarded closed and even those boards were half loose and awry. The roof had rotted under heavy moss and fallen deadwood from the live oak and the tin patches were dark copper red with scaling rust, but it would be our house and so I worked on it every spare hour.

One day I was mending roof with cedar shakes when Charlie stepped inside and peered up at the big hole under the peak, her elegant small head turned upward like the head of a slender tree snake paused on a sunlit branch. Seeing me silhouetted on the sun, she sang, “My hero! He Who Patches the Blue Sky!” Next came a cry of delight because just at that moment an oriole had flown in one window, out the other. “Did you see it, Mister? Our good omen!” she called.

I could not bear so much feeling any longer. I climbed down and took both her hands, asked her to marry. Those black eyes widened. Fearing I’d been too abrupt, I implored her to forgive me. “Give it some thought, at least,” I begged when tears came to her eyes. She raised a finger to my lips.

“I have given it far too much thought already. I shall marry you,” she whispered, kissing my cheek.

We dined in the oak shade out of her napkined basket. Afterward we lay together and we kissed, as we had done on so many desperate occasions, debating old spidery ideas of sin. This day we stopped without a word and turned our backs and clambered out of our cumbersome farm clothes. When I said “One-two-three,” we turned, not looking, starting to laugh. I stuck my hands out and when she took them we kneeled naked, facing, on the sun-warmed linen. Excepting the burned copper of our arms and faces, we were milky white. I drew her close and at once felt mysteriously complete.

We were brave virgins, shy and clumsy, but we trusted each other with all our hearts. Trembling, I laid her down and held her tight for a long while before kissing her cheek and her warm throat under her ears and at last her lips. But very soon my monkey hand wandered the small breasts and taut nipples, the silken skin of her inner thigh. When it touched her wetness, she gasped and closed her eyes. Her thigh slid over mine and I eased her over on her back and lay between her legs for near a minute, feeling blessed. When I realized that, awaiting me, the poor thing held her breath, I ran my hands under her hips and raised her gently, and she bent her knees as her legs rose. With a groan of relief, I entered that pearly glisten.

I was awkward and too urgent and I hurt her. Pain was the reason she cried out. A moment later, I cried out, too, as scent, touch, birdsong, Indian summer night were stitched into delirium by a magic insect walking the sun-warmed skin of my bare bottom. Afterward I lay astonished, home at last.